The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 51
‘I am galled,’ said Lloyd Thomas in a low steady voice. The opinions of the rabble mattered nothing to his pride. It was his greatest expression of absolute anger, and was not to be blocked.
‘How am I to bring that fellow down,’ he thought, ‘and how soon? I will have the woman anyhow.’ While Moreno signed the required documents to have female convict Kemp assigned to his care, Lloyd Thomas gave orders to have Moreno traced. When he was sure where he lodged, he would pay him a visit, and bargain for the use of her.
Anne Kemp went down the ladder first, making a celebration event of it as her friends cheered and cried out, and threw their kisses.
As Moreno followed his prize he turned around backwards to get on the ladder and his eyes came level with the deck where he saw a pair of convict eyes watching him —
‘That is the priest,’ Moreno said to himself, with a confused thudding shock, and already, in his mind, he was off from there as swiftly as he could go. Whether it was the ghost of the parson watching him or the parson himself, saved from the gallows, it made no difference to Moreno. There was enough to be superstitious about inside the boundaries of New South Wales for a long time now and he wanted to get out of them.
EACH OVERSEER OF SECTIONS — MICK Tornley the bullocks, Arthur and Solly Josephs the horses, Joe Josephs the stores, Martha Josephs the kitchens, and Tom Rankine himself over the convicts — was issued with a white bandolier, a veritable cincture of office, a sash to be worn each time the horn was blown for the muster.
That horn was the old ram’s horn gifted by Parson Stanton to Joe, worked up to a straight length of four feet in a bed of hot sand, and now, as they dealt with the news of the parson’s comeuppance in life — after not being hanged — Joe scratched out the parson’s names and dates where he’d written them, on a flat part of the trumpet, when believing he was dead. It was inscribed in Hebrew lettering with the parson’s old motto — which he left there, anyhow — Know before whom thou doth stand. Joe recited prayers for a man whose mystery was that he was liked at all. ‘May he live in the world again as a better sort of bloke,’ was some of what Joe muttered. ‘Blessed art Thou, King of the universe, who gives life to the dead through those left behind.’ It was not a request, but stated as something that God was able to do. That was the prayerful man, Joe.
On his ride out from Sydney after being released by Lloyd Thomas, Rankine had ridden through Laban Vale to get himself another couple of horses and to see what Moreno was up to there, with the parson away. He’d wanted to greet Moreno again and get the feeling of him on trust. He was anxious to make his night’s camp farther along the track, and to reach Meg within the week. An exchange of horses would allow a better turn of speed.
He located Moreno in the yards classing ram lambs. Turning to see Rankine there, Moreno embraced him and wept.
There were shepherds standing by ready to drag the lambs up to the Spaniard. From the way Moreno dealt with them Rankine could see that he had good authority. There were only a few dozen ram lambs left to do. He was culling those lacking what he liked in a sire and rather than selling them off more cheaply, was butchering them and salting them, and selling the meat. He liked a strong broad forehead, a straight nose, a straight back, long legs, a dense staple of nicely crimped wool, and somewhere about a ram’s hocks, some hairs of the burnish that Moreno in his pride claimed as his. Well, was Rankine to differ? The reddish ones thrived. He could not tell they were reddish unless Moreno said so. That reddishness, indeed, came more under the heading of quality of features, as listed. Moreno felt safe with his sheep now; they bought him respect; he no longer hid behind the nom de laine of a mucky shearer. If a ram carried the brown it was potent to a high degree.
There were several hundred ram lambs born the previous autumn and many had already proved themselves by serving ewes when they were hardly five months old. These special types were tarred as potent and valued two and three times more than the rest. Each ordinary ram would bring Moreno a high price anyway, and every one of them had a buyer waiting. A steady eye, a well-attended flock, herbage of the open forest, and without Rankine or Stanton to rule him, Moreno was king.
They talked in Spanish, their language of the heart and of the stones of hardship. Moreno told his workers to make do for an hour, and took Rankine into the house, where all the Stantons’ furniture, from the book cases to the cuckoo clock and butter churns and pats and moulds, were draped over in cloths. Moreno lived at the end of the verandah, half outdoors, with his leather and utensils covered in dust, a pair of boots under his cot. They drank rum mixed with water. When Rankine finished telling Moreno about his captivity, there was no more bad feeling left between them.
Next morning Rankine rode on. A week later he came to the silvered plain, ringed by dark hills, where Tornley and Josephs had their run.
There was a star burning on the hillside, the night Rankine found Meg. Too sad for the moment to say what the star remembered, except, when he was closer, and his horse’s hooves made a knock on the stones, the star showed itself to be a candle. It was held in the still night air up to Rankine’s face so that she could see him. It had a reflector of polished tin. They said some words, ordinary greetings because for the emotions involved, no words existed but I love you yet, I love you still. Before anything, Meg told him how in midsummer there had been a burial on the hill, there by the wattle trees she showed him in the morning (all the blossoms set to seed in brittle bronze casings). Their son, born in August, was dead by Christmas. Meg had named him Tom.
Then she looked at Rankine properly:
‘Oh, my darling, what have they done to you?’
There was no call for Rankine to describe what he’d been through, he was too shamed. It was explained in the drawn lines of his cheeks, by his thin frame, and by his lacklustre formerly fine head of hair, still growing back in lumps after being razored off. It was told by his pale eyes burned back in his head. Then — after they went inside, and everyone awoke, got up, and sat around the table — there was Rankine’s way of touching his wrists absently as he talked; reaching down to scratch the sores on his ankles, where his manacles had been. Small actions told a lot to anyone living in old time N.S. Wales and knowing the signs. They told of haggard convicts standing in line and never knowing from which direction the blow would come. Privileged as he’d been compared with many, Rankine carried that cringing deflection inside him, and Meg understood. Lying together that night they were as formal as strangers, until their fingers touched and they broke their formality in tears, and were in each other’s arms, never again to part.
There was a big hill above duck mole reach. Until it had its trees removed it was never much noticed as a feature. Now it stood over the place in a raw lump. After weeks of getting in practice with sextant, compass, and barometer, Rankine calculated its height at three thousand, two hundred and seventy-three feet, and built a cairn on its summit from which Duck Hill, as he called it, would thenceforth be known as the starting point of a measured line west, on Rankine’s survey. On its east flank it erupted in orange rocks, ferns, blackwood trees, and became that jumbled cliff where Patrick Lehane drove Mick Tornley’s bullocks over, that had jumped and survived.
From the back of the hill away down, tall stands of timber were the story of creeks and rivers folding into the coastal ranges far distant; and in the other direction, the west, from which Rankine and Meg came climbing, was its even more parched western slope looking down on Tharpe’s at a bend of the duck mole. It was like a battleground smoking ready for tomorrow. Mares were being shod by blacksmiths, wheelwrights went around greasing axles, teamsters worked last scrapes of fat into their leather traces and set doleful blinkers on draught horses. When you lifted your eyes from looking down on those scenes of bullock lines, tents, horse pickets, drays and everybody primed for their twelve miles a day (estimated), then how the ruffled ocean of the country spread beyond. The land west had extended flatness, its trees along scribbles of creeks gave a daylight darkness, a charcoaled look to the parched country, smeared smouldering into the sky where fire cones of natives were seen.
‘Coolich,’ George Marsh had named the musk lorikeet, musk because of their heads smelling sweet after they’d thrown a fit and died; some flew past, calling; and then there were eagles, a pair of them rising in thermals, with their wingtips trailing out, high above everything. Over from somewhere behind, in the ravines of forest dropping away to the east, the most unusual pipe of a whistling hawk was heard — well out of its place, thought Rankine. Echoey, deep. The whistling hawk was only ever seen over the salt flats hunting for fish when Rankine first overlanded his sheep past Parramatta: it was the first New Holland bird he ever felt clutching his soul. And now as he heard it, he remembered, that a boy used that whistle. It did come from below, from under the escarpment.
Even a year ago you could climb that hill and see nothing out from its trees, and now all the trees were cut down for firewood and railings, cornerposts and shingles. Here was a little storm of congestion, and may be, by the time Rankine’s expedition reached its farthermost limit, turned around, and came wending back (six months, a year from now?), duck mole in the scribbly woods would have a proper name, and a main street between its ruptured tree stumps and tethered billy goats. It might not be the venue for a dream any more, the starting line of a ballad. It might even have a gaol, but if it did, it wouldn’t be able to fit back in all the convicts that were getting ready to march out under Tom Rankine’s lead. The convict commissioner was expected that night, or at the very least, next morning: of whom it was said that if he didn’t come, they would not go, as he was their patron in chief, and brought pardons. And echoing such phrasing were a few lewd women of the camp who agreed, if he didn’t come, they wouldn’t go either.
Each afternoon around four Rankine left off his preparations and found Meg in the heart of the camp, and the two of them walked up the hill and found a log that wasn’t burned, that was their love seat. Rankine had a bag of Moreno’s rosewater sugar-plums, which they sucked while they shared their thoughts. The smoke of a dozen cookfires sent ribbony vapour along the ponded stream as parties of men, broke of their chains after being picked for this service, came in from their last chores hardly believing their luck in the ample quality of freedom found in the work given them, under the charge of one of their recently branded own — Ugly Tom Rankine, Vandemonian passholder, veteran of punishment gangs. Down and across the brittle grass and dry sticks for their supper they came, looking around for him, and saying there he is, Tom, our gentleman Tom, and weaving their way drunk with satisfaction between various kitchen fires to find their man.
The duckbills were like small sticks floating in the water around this time of day, where Rankine and Meg walked down to look. The most of the animal was never seen. They paddled below the surface, platypus coming along feeding, nosing the banks of their underwater burrows, invisible presences and certainly ignored by the clamorous troop of workers everywhere. But each time Rankine and Meg came past, Meg looked for one and remembered what was hidden from her sight and her touch and her love for ever; the child buried with barely a name whose last sign of existence was a distraction of sadness, when she woke.
Out along a broad gully, people not on Rankine’s roll of stores, but nevertheless getting a share of them (flour, salt, sugar, tea), ash-daubed themselves lighter than their dark skins would show in firelight, mixing ochres and clays in cupped handfuls of water, and getting ready to sing. They pulled down shaggy bunches of gum leaves and dragged boughs back through the dust and piled them ready for use.
Tents, picket lines, waggons, drays and livestock areas, horselines, bullock lines, donkey stalls. Beds on the ground, with just the possessions allowed that could be carried on the back in a blanket roll: it was Rankine’s town on many legs, with such a feel of ponderous ability, it bore repeating: only when Commissioner Lloyd Thomas arrived with Rankine’s and Kale’s free pardon, handed to Rankine, examined by Rankine and confirmed as authentically stamped, would they all get up from the ground, gather and combine their separate portions, and get under way as one.
A plan was rehearsed in case of attack by natives, by coming in every night and pulling the big drays up in two lines sheltering the sleepers between them from spears and waddies of warriors. Otherwise than this caution, they were a full massed orchestra of bellows and timber knocks and dinging metal, a music of cow bells, hobble chains, waggon links creaking. But first Rankine’s signal, set for tomorrow, before anything:
‘I will go up on the bare hill, you’ll see me on the womback path. Soon after sunrise, I’ll raise my arm, and bring it down. Just as the light comes, across in the east there, watch.’
A quality came out in Rankine in full command, a very serious involved concentration. It lost him to Meg at times but that was all right. He would be easier after a few more weeks, with them all farther out, on some yellow grass plain slowly moving. Then they would get back everything that was fragmented. Her time with Rankine had been short. Broken. So much to look forward to already finished, taken, never to be recovered. Just the happiness of anticipation (and most of it consumed in struggle) seemed to carry the large part of enjoyment in life.
Thin ropes of Artie Josephs’s fiddle music thickened into denser strands of sound as Tom and Meg found their waggon, where Martha had a pot of hot stew ready, and Artie put his fiddle down in its case, and the boys and Leah and Joe stood around with chunks of bread ready to scoop up their share.
They were halfway through eating when a woman wrapped in a green shawl with a sharply beautiful, sluttish face came into their firelight, and looming up behind her carelessly like a great ape with a hand on her thin shoulder was Paolo Moreno.
He gave the woman over to them for her supper, just shoved her towards Martha and Meg to be accommodated, not pausing to give her name, only to say, ‘Ungry’.
Her name was Anne Kemp, as she straightly told them when Moreno and Rankine were gone from the firelight to the back of the waggon to deal with Moreno’s problem.
Poor thing, she was frightened in the bush. A huge resoundingly empty cold hostile dark dungeon without walls, it did seem to her, so soon off a convict ship and chafed sore from sitting up behind Moreno on a nag when she had never ridden aback a horse before. Artie Josephs stared at her slain with love, jolted from a romantic headspin over pretty girls of whom there were three in the camp that he cared for, but this one could be had for a coin. Solly saw his brother’s knees tremble as he tried holding his tin plate of stew in his lap, and wondered why his brother was frightened of her so.
Meg made sure the woman was politely received, but she did not think she would ever like her. Martha, whose own apprenticeship to crime was in a brothel, where many girls died young, thought more charitably how fresh air might kill the poor commercial darlink if she didn’t get rigged up in a blanket — it was too exciting altogether for someone who lived on excitements of brutal kinds. Later she thought, ‘My Arfur could do worse than fall in love with a whore so long as she keeps her hands off of him.’
It was the last chorus of the last verse of a ballad with the words of the last lines flying over them in a flock of birds, in a torrent of shooting stars, in a handful of gritty dust thrown in their eyes when they hadn’t known such a night was coming upon them, hadn’t known finality was in the air with the ashes and sparks of so many campfires whisking around their ears crackling promise. Away out where they were going Kale was retreated to the banks of a billabong with twenty-seven remaining ewes from so many hundred, and two greatly horned rams, being all that was left to him after the rest were speared. Biddy Magee was terrified over the bands preying on them, worn thin from excitement when Clumpsy M’Carty appeared with a black man, Piper, who was able to speak to the attackers and persuade them off. They set to work building fences and yards where Rankine in two months would find them. There was a tin whistle Kale carried in his belt, and sometimes called his best rams to him, because they knew, when he played, there was the feast of their appetites among the ewes he picked for them. There was a ram lamb to be born from these last joinings and he was the one, called Supreme Matchless, that Blaise Cribb would send word of to Bramley. In the stud books down two hundred years and more he would be known as the Abraham.
Tom Rankine stood in the shadows of a waggon. He listened standing slightly stooped and considering, cupping a hand to his good ear to what Moreno told him in his low rumble. How getting away from Sydney with his womans he slowed only to find a priests, and paid the priests ten sovereigns to marry thems — how they were followed, but Moreno lost the tail when they got to Labans Vales to gather some last belongings. Lloyd Thomases wanted the womans from him, but Moreno would kill the convicts commissioners if he touched her.
‘She stays with us, then,’ said Rankine. Martha would see to her, and keep her from sight.
‘All rights,’ groaned Moreno.
‘Anything else, Paolo?’
Moreno said there was something else. As they’d rode into the trees past Labans Vales homestead paddock from the other ends of the track there was a column of dust and they waited. It was a sheeps man new to the country and the sheeps man’s assigned convict servant and two boys riding with them. Moreno in his pride of stewardship went back to greet them. The two mens knew him. One from a long time ago in another country, the other more recently, and back from the grave.
Rankine had no need to ask which sheep man it was, which assigned convict it was, knowing very well it was his stepbrother, Cribb, with Matthew Stanton and their party of settlers chasing up, which Moreno then confirmed at prouder length, when he saw Rankine wasn’t annoyed — more relieved to be told of it — telling how Stanton was the convict servant now and young Mrs Cribbs the new owner of Labans Vales, she was pleased to the care given on her Labans Vales by a Spaniard.
